[blintson]

Most of my school's funding is and was not dependent on their student's skills, schools get funding for attendance. When I went to school they checked attendance 6 times every day (once for every class), and gave you 3 bathroom breaks/year/class. Taking attendance took about 5 mins/ class, every time you went to the bathroom a teacher had to sign a form verifying you had permission. This comes out to about* 340,000 HOURS of wasted time in ONE YEAR FOR ONE HIGHSCHOOL. This isn't even considering many, many fundamentally wrong things with how grades and classes are structured and credit is awarded. For every competent teacher teaching a useful subject there are 3-4 incompetents wasting people's time with sophistry and selectively blind adherence to stated rules.

Public high school education in this country is a net negative. High school "education" has nothing to do with teaching students skills, its there first to benefit the people running the school, and second to make people obedient for factory jobs.

Math & science people tend to be humble & introverted because they're usually wrong about the solution to whatever problem they're trying to solve, and they spend all their time doing math/science and not talking to people. This is a bad thing. Every hour spent on spiffy presentations is an hour not spent on telling people public school's are doing it wrong. The author wasted his/her time on this* * , it's not going to change anything. Math/Science people who want to improve the state of math/science education should spend their time politicking, not science'ing.

* (5mins/attendance * 6 classes * 10 mins bathroom break form filling/a day * 2000 students * 34 weeks/year / 60mins/hour = 340K)

* * It is pretty cool, though.

[stretchwithme]

I completely agree. And when you look at what is taught and how, you may be glad that instruction is not possible for at least part of the day.

I've listening to the mises.org podcast of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty and it deals with the subject extensively.

I've concluded that there really is no good reason to coerce people to use their brains. In fact, its impossible.

Maybe that's why Albert Einstein said “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

[tokenadult]

Full Einstein quotation:

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail."

It's embedded in more context here:

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

[stretchwithme]

awesome.

maybe the best thing we can teach our kids is to not concern themselves with pleasing these people. that, and do our best to help them find answers to every question that they come up with.

[Retric]

* (5mins/attendance * 6 classes * 10 mins bathroom break form filling/a day * 2000 students * 34 weeks/year / 60mins/hour = 340K)

  Mistakes:
  Actual school days in 34 weeks = 5 * 34 days
  5min / day * 10 minutes bathroom break = 50minutes 
  Bathroom break form does not take 10 munutes per class.

More reasonable calculation 6 class * (( 5 min / day * 34weeks * 5days / week) + 3 * 10 min) * 2000 students / (60 min / hour) = 176K hours.

PS: Checking attendance takes less than 5 minutes, but adding in the time it takes them to fill out a form and I am willing to say 5 minutes lost to that type of activity.

[timthorn]

It's worth sanity checking statistics - 340000 hours is equal to nearly 39 years, which seems a bit on the high side for a single school in a single year...

[michael_dorfman]

Exactly. Attendence checking doesn't take 5 minutes per student per class, yet that's what's being claimed by the math....

[kyteland]

If we can measure time spent productively in man-months then I say we can measure time wasted by the same metric.

[olefoo]

Actually if taking attendance takes 5 minutes of class time (which it easily can with a class size of 30), then all students are blocked from being taught while the teacher is busy so it does make sense to count that as (n+1) * 5 minutes where n is the number of students.

Fingerprint scanners for attendance would both speed up and parallelize this operation.

[cma]

What could possibly go wrong with implementing a complicated biometric fingerprint scanner based system for our schools?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068

[olefoo]

Well card swipes are obviously unworkable. You could maybe link it to student's mobile phones...

But the real solution is to have decent schools with classes small enough that the teacher doesn't have to take roll call because they know everyone.

[three14]

The claim seems to be that if I waste an hour of my time and an hour of yours, then that's two hours down the drain. I agree with it. (Although it seems to be missing * 5 days in a week.)